Who wouldn't like the idea of a perfectly quiet mouse? You can mouse around with reckless abandon without bothering anyone else, rustling up all your daily porn without a peep coming out of that little rodent—no clicky noise, no scroll wheel ratcheting, no nothing. That's what enticed me to buy the Thanko Silent Mouse, which boomeranged its way around the blogosphere back in March. Everybody seemed to like the idea of it, but apparently no one has ever tried it out first-hand.

If you've ever rejected a mouse because it clicks so loud you can hear it in the next room,…
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That's what I did, and found this Thanko Silent Mouse to suck big time. Yes, it is actually silent, but its glaring weaknesses makes it just not worth it. The thing feels like it's made of the cheapest plastic ever manufactured, one step above cellophane. Worse, it's smaller than its online pictures depict, about three-quarters the size of a normal Microsoft mouse. Let's give it a good drubbing:

When you press down on the left-click and right-click buttons, it makes no noise whatsoever, but you can't feel any clicks, either. There's no tactile feedback at all. There's just this rubbery, bottomless travel that gives you no indication of when you've actually engaged that button. Plus, to actually register a click you need to push so hard on the button that your finger actually gets tired after a while.

One thing I did like was the unusually bright backlight underneath the mouse wheel. It's a hot blue color, and looks appealing. But the mouse wheel is where the fatal trouble developed with this Thanko Silent Mouse. After less than a week of occasional use, the mouse wheel suddenly refused to turn, rendering the Silent Mouse useless to me, since I use the scroll wheel most of the time. As far as I was concerned, the Silent Mouse was dead.

That's why I wrote this post: to warn you about the Thanko Silent Mouse. It's another pretty good idea embodied in a cheap, slipshod product, hastily made in China at extremely low cost. But that meager manufacturing cost is not passed along to you, the innocent consumer. The thing costs $20.67, but after you've paid for shipping from Japan, that price balloons to $33.17.